Phrasebank Vol. I

Preface

About this dictionary

The phrase, not the word

Word frequency falls off as a power law. A few words do a large share of the work, and a long tail of words is rare. Fixed phrases behave the same way in ordinary speech. A handful of expressions carry anger, embarrassment, luck, refusal, and exaggeration, over and over, while most imaginable wordings are never said. Phrasebank starts at that unit. It is not a word list, and it is not a book of proverbs for their own sake. Each headword is a phrase people actually reach for.

This first volume has 37 entries in Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and English. The count is small on purpose. A wrong gloss is worse than a missing page. Where an origin story is disputed or unchecked, the entry says so, and then declines to tell it.

How to read an entry

The headword carries a language tag. Under it is a reading or a romanization: hiragana and Hepburn for Japanese, pinyin with tone marks for Chinese. Languages already written in the Latin alphabet are not romanized again.

Word by word is a gloss, not a translation. It walks the parts in order so the image is visible. The idiomatic sense is the thing a speaker means. Those two lines are allowed to disagree. They usually do. That disagreement is the entry. In the gloss, GEN marks a possessive or associative particle, NOM a subject particle, and ACC an object particle.

Register is how formal the phrase is. Tone is the attitude it tends to bring with it: comic, blunt, warm, scolding. Examples are short and made for this book. Their English lines are written as English, not as a calque of the source sentence.

Equivalents are other languages' ways of doing the same job, or of failing to. Each one is marked.

exact
The image and the job both match.
near
The job matches. The picture is different, or the wording is only partly the same.
partial
The uses overlap, and then they part. Read the note before treating them as substitutes.
none
No compact equivalent is offered. The note says how a speaker would put it instead.

What was checked, and what was left alone

Japanese headwords in this volume were confirmed in JMdict, the Japanese–English dictionary file of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group, through a public search. That check was for the headword, the reading, and the rough sense. Glosses, examples, grammar notes, and equivalents in Phrasebank were written for this book. They are not extracts. JMdict's own English wording is not reproduced.

German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and English entries were written from ordinary educated use and from the standard sense of each idiom. No page of Duden, Le Robert, the RAE, or a Chinese dictionary is quoted, and none is cited as if a particular edition had been opened for this book.

Classical anecdotes for three Chinese entries are named, because those phrases point at known passages. No critical edition and no sentence number is claimed. Folk etymologies for the other languages are marked as stories this book does not adopt.

Romanization is modified Hepburn for Japanese, with particles spelled out and spaced (o for を, wa is not needed in these headwords). Chinese readings are Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks. Simplified characters are the headwords; traditional forms are alternate spellings for search.

Credit

JMdict, EDICT, and the related dictionary files are the work of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group. Copyright in those files is held by James William Breen and the Group. The Group's licence page releases the files under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. An older WWWJDIC information page described material displayed by that server as CC BY-SA 3.0. The files' own current licence page is the 4.0 text.

WWWJDIC is the Group's dictionary search, associated with Jim Breen. Phrasebank borrows an idea from that screen: one box, every field, dense results. It does not borrow the file. No JMdict, EDICT, or WWWJDIC data is redistributed here, and this book claims no right in those files. Where material from the files is mixed with other information, the Group asks for a general acknowledgement. This page is that acknowledgement. Phrasebank is not endorsed by the Group.

The wording of Phrasebank, apart from the names of the idioms themselves, is original to this book and is released under the same Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 terms, so a reader who later mixes the two has a compatible licence to stand on. That choice does not put JMdict text into these pages.

Limits

Thirty-seven phrases are not a language. Regional variants are noted only where this book is sure of them. Chinese here is modern written vernacular in simplified characters, not classical Chinese as a separate language, even where a phrase alludes to a classical passage. Spanish is general informal Spanish, not pinned to one country. Nothing here is a medical, legal, or historical authority. The death euphemisms are labeled as flippant so they are not copied into a condolence.